Connecting to Futures: Throwing a Curve: Yikes Design Squares Up

There are few times when a threadbare cliché—such as, say, thinking outside the box—seems made for a moment.

When Grace Blackley and Maddie Harbert were in the early stages of their design degrees at Kent State University, they learned one of the first foundational lessons students are taught to master early on in the program: to draw a square. The two bonded over struggling with the assignment in a dorm room into the early morning hours.

“You have to draw it out perfectly and that was really hard!” says Harbert. “I remember getting into it and being like ‘Oh my god this, is what they want? This is the level of perfection they need from us?’ That was a little intimidating.”

By the time they graduated, the two were ready to think, work, and be outside the box. In fact, they came bursting, bubbling, blooming out of the box to form the design firm Yikes, which  produces brand identities, illustrations, merchandise, and graphics in bold, bright colors and voluptuous shapes, nearly absent of 90-degree angles, let alone four of them together with four lines of equal sides.

At Nordonia High School, Blackley was a social butterfly, while Harbert was an introvert who wore all black and was content to paint deep into the night in solitude. Blackley is a Chi Omega sister (“Any Chi Omega that will read this will be super-excited”) who says she probably partied a little too much and attended classes too little. Harbert kept more focused in college and currently swears a lot. But the center of their Venn diagram is more crowded than should be expected.

Harbert took inspiration from artwork created by her mother that hung in the family’s home, but she experienced a nearly religious epiphany as a young child.

“One of the most memorable moments was in Sunday school,” she says. “I never had an interest in religion. I was bored there, and I remember coloring this sheet with markers. I did blue and yellow and made green. And I was, like, ‘Oh my god—this is magic.’ Like, I don’t give a shit what this paper says, all I care about is that I made a new color. That was a really powerful moment—to be able to make something new totally from scratch.”

“[Art] was always there, you know, I was always drawing, always just wanting to prioritize art making, always doodling in class.”

Blackley, too, always liked to draw from an early age. “I have ADHD, and it was undiagnosed my entire life. So school was not my strong suit by any means. I would usually be daydreaming and drawing, all the time. That was my stress relief for everything,” she says.

“And also in school, it was something I looked forward to. Art class was my favorite, and so then I did that as my hobby, and now it’s my career. It’s my only thing,” she says with a laugh. “It was the only thing I was good at that I know of.”

Aware of each other at Nordonia High but not at the time friends, they both took refuge in its art department. Both were encouraged to consider graphic design as a career by the same photography teacher (shoutout to Dave Carter!). Both navigated their teens and early twenties with undiagnosed ADHD (“It answers a lot of questions,” Harbert says with a laugh). And both landed at Kent State University’s School of Visual Communication Design at the same time.

“The first year was really hard—they were weeding people out,” Blackley says of Kent. “I tend to take things as a challenge. So, I took that challenge. I did pretty well, [and was] encouraged enough to stay within the program.”

She struggled with a typography class because she hadn’t learned much about the topic before college. Blackley was also unfamiliar with the design software, which the school didn’t teach to its students, she says. “They just had us teach ourselves which I was not very good at doing.”

Consequently, she says, “I didn’t like a lot of my work at that time.”

Design students at Kent are subject to a portfolio review their sophomore year to determine whether they earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree or the Bachelor of Arts, or are tossed from the program. Blackley got the BA, and picked up a fine arts minor. “I think when I got that minor in fine art and started focusing more on my schoolwork is when I started liking my work a little bit more,” she says.

“Kent was crazy,” says Harbert, who graduated with a BFA. “I was definitely more, like, head down. I knew this was for me pretty much from the start. But the first two years were pretty hard. The portfolio review was very intense.”

Classes in letterpress and screen-printing came along just in time for Blackley and Harbert.

“I feel like [letterpress] kind of sparked a little more of wanting to do more things with my hands and just more tactile projects,” says Harbert. “I was just getting kind of bored with all the briefs and the problems and the Swiss design and everything.”

Blackley took the screen-printing class and Harbert says it became “a huge influence for Yikes.”

“I was, like, ‘Bro, you’re making some cool shit! You’re able to print multiple copies of something in multiple colors, it looks amazing, it’s handmade, but it’s still an art print that you could sell for more money or whatever!’” She read books and viewed YouTube videos to learn the techniques herself and joined Blackley, who was interning at Zygote Press at the time, in printing together. They sold some of the prints produced there at an outdoor music festival.

“We made our LLC eventually out of Zygote,” Blackley says.

The pair continue to incorporate handmade elements into their work, drawing and painting and scanning it for use on iPads, adding digital elements, printing the product, and repeating the process.

“It’s just nonstop,” says Harbert. “But having that handmade touch in that process even though it is a digital piece in the end it still makes it more human-made.”

Blackley says it also makes the work custom—original and unique for the client.

Blackley has held onto a day job as a designer for PNC Bank and Harbert, who was laid off in 2023 from her job as a designer with Go Media, is full time at Yikes: they split up the duties to fit their time and talents. Harbert, who often works on typography and layouts, says that Blackley usually does the illustrations—“the ‘let’s go crazy’ sort of thing—she’s the dreamer. I’m still a dreamer, too, but more of the realist—the nitty-gritty design work”—but says there’s lots of crossover in their roles.

Inspirations come from many directions—the reference books they keep in their Lakeside Avenue studio, the typical online sources of Pinterest, outdoor signage for typography ideas, and art history—Blackley likes Matisse, and Harbert has a soft spot for Monet that even she finds surprising: “Monet’s waterlilies make me cry—and I’m, like, ‘What the hell?’”

The bold, bell-bottomed typography and design hints at Mod and hippie styles, but Blackley feels it’s more a product of their own intention rather than influence.

“I think it’s more personality driven now,” she says. “It somehow correlates to that time era—I’m assuming because it’s bright, free, bold.”

While Harbert admits to an affection for the era from looking through her parents’ album covers, she concurs that it’s what’s behind that design that appeals to her. “I remember always loving the stuff from the 60s and 70s, always connecting with that style. I always loved that sort of—like Grace said—the freedom, the expression; it’s not corporate design. People weren’t afraid to take risks back then.”

Harbert says that when she graduated she wasn’t finding much exciting about design and use of typefaces. “Nothing really had a ton of personality,” she says. “That was our goal. We love to put big bold personality into our work, and we weren’t feeling that with our jobs. So we were, like, ‘Let’s have fun.’”

And, as fun and well-rounded as Yikes Design has become, the principals seem to have an appreciation for their square roots at Kent.

“Without being able to just run free, all of a sudden I had to learn all these new set of rules that I never knew before,” says Blackley. “Those rules are very important to design—I think I started understanding that more towards my junior and senior year.”

Harbert agrees. “I feel like by the time we graduated we had a good solid foundation. But, yeah, it was time to start breaking rules. We’re just tired of doing it all by the books for so long.”